Quotes from Alexander McCall Smith

As they left the shop, Mma Ramotswe made amends and told Mma Makutsi that she really thought the blue shoes very beautiful. There was no point in disapproving of a purchase once the deed had been done.

Goodnight, my boy," said the Cardinal. "And God bless." It was a kind thing to say to a dog, and a good thing. Because the least of us, the very least, has the same claim as any other to that love, divine or human, which makes our world, in all its turmoil and pain, easier to comprehend, easier to bear.

Metaphors were so bloody: people shot messengers, flogged dead horses, cut the throats of their competitors. Perhaps that was life; perhaps that was what it was really like.

Mma Makutsi had overheard this remark and had been so cross that her glasses misted over; that was always a bad sign, Mma Ramotswe knew.

It was not really like a person moving, thought Mma Ramotswe; it was more a geological movement

Ulf sighed. Why could people not live together in harmony? Why did people think that berating and assaulting others should do anything but make everything worse for everybody?

Baked dough—one of the great smells…He stopped himself; that was the sort of pronouncement that Chloe made, and he must avoid becoming like her, or he would end up making sweeping statements about Russians, just as she did.

The manacles we forge for ourselves might be comfortable ones, may not chafe too much, and yet they are manacles nonetheless – bonds of family, of profession, of debt, of personal obligation. Or they may be woven of the simple and only too familiar lassitude that prevents us from doing anything to disturb the established patterns of our life.

In the past we've been so casual about hurting people, about allowing people to be disparaged because they're different in some way. If you disparage people for what they are, then you're saying something about their nature, about who they are. You're saying You don't count as much as others because of what you are." He paused. "And that's pretty devastating, isn't it?

And then, when the inevitable mechanical failure occurred, rather than trying to understand what signs had been overlooked, he would bully the engine. There was no other word for it: he would bully it by removing bolts and nuts brutally;

If one could not remember somebody's trousers, then jeans were the safe default. Indeed, "defaults" was a good name for jeans. I put on my defaults. It sounded quite right.

Two mountains in Greece, you see: Virgil refers to piling Pelion upon Ossa as a metaphor for adding one very large thing to another—going too far, in other words.

People who hated often had to work quite hard at keeping their hatred warm.

That young barista you spoke to," Ulf said. "I think we should have a word with him." Blomquist took a tentative sip of his still-steaming coffee. "Why?" Ulf resisted the temptation to tell the policeman that it was not for him to question the direction of an investigation being carried out by the Sensitive Crimes Department

She would not allow herself to remember how Note had treated her, and many others too, she suspected. She had forgiven him, yes, but she still did not like to remember. And perhaps a deliberate act of forgetting went along with forgiveness. You forgave, and then you said to yourself: Now I shall forget. Because if you did not forget, then your forgiveness would be tested, perhaps many times and in ways that you could not resist, and you might go back to anger, and to hating.

But that was what the world was like; we battered and bashed and poured out clouds of smoke and chemicals and particles of every description to bring forth our little objects of desire, our baubles.

Sometimes I go blind. Then I take my right hand out to dinner.

There once was a woman name of Sil, Who inserted a lit dynamite stick for a thrill. They found her vagina in North Carolina- And bits of her tits in Brazil.

A life without stories would be no life at all. And stories bound us, did they not, one to another, the living to the dead, people to animals, people to the land?

Any author of fiction will tell you that characters don't need to be told what to do.

The wider your readership, the greater the chances of offending your readers.

My wife Elizabeth and I started The Really Terrible Orchestra for people like us who are pretty hopeless musicians who would like to play in an orchestra. It has been a great success. We give performances; we've become the most famous bad orchestra in the world.

There is this intimacy still in Botswana. It's a country of just under two million people, and there's this sense of connectedness, in that people tend to be related to one another.

I would never inflict my bassoon on anybody really other than the long suffering audiences that come to the concerts of The Really Terrible Orchestra; which actually is really terrible.